"Jedem den Seinen" Gate at Nazi Buchenwald Concentration Camp
Coffee stories have been chasing me for days. News stories about the health dangers of caffeine and Ethic Soup has reported on them. And now this...
This one, this coffee story has chased me in my nightmares. The holocaust just won't go away.
A German coffee roaster with a chain of coffee shops, Hamburg-based Tschibo, has had a nation-wide advertising campaign jointly with Esso petrol stations in Germany. (Esso is the international trade name for ExxonMobil.) It used the phrase "Jedem den Seinen" to advertise its coffee varieties. The English translation of the slogan is "To each their own." However after complaint the company has just this week pulled its ad campaign and recalled some 700 posters from the gas stations where they hung, featuring the slogan, reports Jewish and Israel News.
"Jedem den Seinen" was the phrase which hung over the main gate at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
This news makes me sick...
Although the literal translation is "To each their own," figuratively it means "Everyone gets what he deserves."
Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz and others; however, more than 56,000 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were starved or worked to death in the camp, reports the London Telegraph.
UNSURPASSED LACK OF TASTE OR TOTAL IGNORANCE
Historians say the phrase dates from ancient Greece and was considered a fundamental of justice in classical law. It was co-opted by Hitler becoming a cynical slogan commonly misused by the Nazis.
Salomon Korn, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the campaign revealed either "an unsurpassed lack of taste" or "total ignorance of history." He said the phrase should not be repeated as long as there are survivors around who will associate it with the concentration camp.
Not surprisingly, everyone involved -- the coffee company Tchibo, the oil group Esso and the advertising firm -- has denied any awareness that the slogan selected had Nazi overtones.
I'm sorry, that's really hard for me to believe, especially when we hear about ugly happenings from Germany's growing neo-nazi movement. But maybe all the folks involved in this campaign are too young to remember the Nazi reign. But then so are the little bastard neo-nazis. And if youth is the blaming factor, what does that say about Germany's educational system and desire never to repeat its horrific history?
TIME AND TIME AGAIN
It's really difficult to believe everyone was so ignorant of the phrase's historical significance when you know that this isn't the first time a German company has run into trouble over the slogan.
It's not the first time, second time, third time, fourth time .... When are people going to acknowledge that just perhaps the German frame-of-mind has not changed all that much?
Cell phone giant Nokia was criticized by the American Jewish committee for advertising exchangeable cell phone covers with the "To Each His Own" slogan in 1998 and quickly swapped the slogan for Shakespeare's "As You Like It," according to Der Spiegel Online.
Shortly after that one, German food-retailer Rewe published a brochure that read "Barbecuing: To Each His Own." The company later made a public apology. However, the combination of Nazi slogan with mental images of concentration camps and 'cooking meat' with gas was particularly gruesome. But Jeez! No one had any idea there were Nazi connotations. Oh Puleeze! It reminds me of how so many good Germans claimed they had no idea there were concentration camps right outside their town. The smell of human flesh and all that smoke? No, no.
Following these advertising campaigns there were those from Burger King and Munich-based Merkur-Bank which used the same slogan in an advertising campaign for bank accounts.
Now who ever heard of so many companies using the same slogan anyway? I can't imagine, not unless it had some "special" meaning. They can deny all they want and some will continue to believe them.
But not me. A lot of cancers are hard to eradicate.
TO READ "EX-KLAN WIZARD DAVID DUKE THROWN OUT BY CZECHS FOR DENYING HOLOCAUST" JUST CLICK HERE.
By Sharon McEachern
Comments